Blockchain Theory

2 Credits · Level: Graduate

Distributed ledgers and the cryptocurrencies that leverage them have become a major focus of both commercial and research interest in recent years. This topic intersects with theoretical computer science in several interesting ways. A growing number of theoreticians, for example, have worked on formally analyzing specific distributed ledger systems, or describing and analyzing algorithms that run on top of them. Furthermore, the systems themselves increasingly leverage existing results on distributed consensus from the theory literature. The goal of this seminar is to explore these different intersections between distributed ledgers and theoretical computer science, with the goal of identifying exciting new research problems and identifying future trends.